Monthly Archives: April 2015

Imperas Extendable Platform Kit Accelerates Development for Recore Many-Core Hardware and Software Program

Oxford, United Kingdom, 2 April 2015 - Imperas Software Ltd. (www.imperas.com), the leader in high-performance software simulation, announced that Recore Systems has selected Imperas for virtual platform based software development tools. Recore is building a new many core hardware platform for various applications, including embedded vision. Recore was able to get started quickly by using an Extendable Platform Kit™ (EPK™) from Imperas.

The FlexaWare platform (www.flexaware.net), new from Recore Systems, is a many-core embedded system with three closely connected components: many-core hardware, a runtime (many-core) OS, and a software development environment. As the platform is built from the ground up, it is imperative to test important design concepts immediately in a simulation environment, to confirm that they function as expected.

Since time to market is crucial, Recore Systems searched for a simulation framework that could support design space exploration as well as software development and test. Recore selected Imperas because of the nature of the components already on offer in the Imperas EPKs.

EPKs are virtual platforms (simulation models) of target devices, including processor model(s) plus peripheral models sufficient to boot an operating system or run bare metal applications. Imperas EPKs are available for download from the Open Virtual Platforms™ (OVP™) website, and are designed to provide a base for developers to run high-speed simulations of various SoCs and platforms. EPKs allow developers to modify and extend the functionality of the virtual platform to reflect their own platform by integrating more component models, running different operating systems, and adding a variety of software applications.

“Imperas allowed us to quickly add our own components and build the topologies which we wanted to test,” says Gerard Rauwerda, CTO of Recore Systems. “We had our first demo up and running in 20 minutes, and it took us just a few days to build a reference hardware architecture based on components in the EPK. Last but not least, after just a few months we could start playing with our own many-core operating system on our many-core hardware design. The ease of use of the EPK, together with excellent Imperas documentation and support, have kick-started our FlexaWare platform development.”

Imperas is continuously adding EPKs to support popular processor cores and platforms. The platform and peripheral models included in the EPKs are open source, so that users can easily add new models to the platform as well as modify the existing models.

EPKs run on either the OVPsim simulator from OVPworld.org or one of the Imperas simulator products. Imperas simulator products also include the iGen™ platform and model productivity tool, which helps users build both platforms and peripheral models. For peripheral models, iGen automatically generates the model architecture along with C language and SystemC/TLM2.0 (C++) interfaces for the model. Using iGen helps developers create high quality, high performance models with minimum time and effort.

OVPsim and Imperas simulator products are very fast, running simulated software at hundreds of millions of instructions per second. Additional performance can be achieved for virtual platforms which include multiple processor instances, multicore processors and processors that support hardware multi-threading. The Imperas QuantumLeap™ parallel simulation accelerator option includes MPonMP™ (MultiProcessor target on MultiProcessor host) technology, so the simulator can take advantage of multiple x86 cores in the host machine. This can result, for example, in a performance increase of 2.25x for a 4-core virtual platform with SMP architecture running on a 4-core host PC.

“Virtual platform based software tools can provide enormous benefits in hardware architectural exploration, higher quality software, and accelerated software development schedules,” said Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas. “EPKs help our users realize positive ROI very quickly, as seen in this case with Recore Systems.”

About Imperas
For more information about Imperas, please go to www.imperas.com.